This is plain from the case of people training for any
contest or action; they practise the activity the whole time. Now
not to know that it is from the exercise of activities on particular
objects that states of character are produced is the mark of a
thoroughly senseless person. Again, it is irrational to suppose that a
man who acts unjustly does not wish to be unjust or a man who acts
self-indulgently to be self-indulgent. But if without being ignorant a
man does the things which will make him unjust, he will be unjust
voluntarily. Yet it does not follow that if he wishes he will cease to
be unjust and will be just. For neither does the man who is ill become
well on those terms. We may suppose a case in which he is ill
voluntarily, through living incontinently and disobeying his
doctors. In that case it was then open to him not to be ill, but not
now, when he has thrown away his chance, just as when you have let a
stone go it is too late to recover it; but yet it was in your power to
throw it, since the moving principle was in you. So, too, to the
unjust and to the self-indulgent man it was open at the beginning
not to become men of this kind, and so they are unjust and
selfindulgent voluntarily; but now that they have become so it is
not possible for them not to be so.
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